


Leucanthemum vulgare

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: Bleach daemon AU [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Retrieval, Demisexuality, Gen, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 10:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18179501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: "Alright! We're ready for attempt seventy-three. Whose turn is it on the pain train?"Grimmjow really, really fucking wishes he could just... Swipe his hand out and snatch Urahara's fucking crow from the rock she's perched on and stuff her head in his mouth. Crunch. Blessed peace.She ain't stupid enough to get that close.Also he's supposed to be a good example. They've amassed about a half-dozen semi-frequent arrancar visitors in here, on top of him and his fracción; he's the most powerful. If he doesn't keep the rest in check they're gonna trigger a shinigami raid on everyone's asses and then none of them will get their daemons back.If that ever happens.--Happens a few days before the last scene ofAll Cats Are Black in the Dark, a pre-Grimmjow/Ichigo oneshot.





	Leucanthemum vulgare

**Author's Note:**

> boss-train-to-boss-town said:  
> For the daemon au, when grimmjow meets leucanthe?
> 
> Anonymous said:  
> prompt for the Bleach daemon AU: WHAT DO THE NAMES MEAN I've been googling and it's not always helping (love that Grimmjow sorta took his previous daemon's name tho!)

"Alright! We're ready for attempt seventy-three. Whose turn is it on the pain train?"

Grimmjow really, really fucking wishes he could just... Swipe his hand out and snatch Urahara's fucking crow from the rock she's perched on and stuff her head in his mouth. Crunch. Blessed peace. 

She ain't stupid enough to get that close. 

Also he's supposed to be a good example. They've amassed about a dozen semi-frequent arrancar visitors in here, on top of him and his fracción; he's the most powerful. If he doesn't keep the rest in check they're gonna trigger a shinigami raid on everyone's asses and then none of them will get their daemons back.

If that ever happens.

(Come to think of it if he eats Urahara Waki it's not gonna happen either way. Eh.)

(It's been ten months, though. Is it _ever_ gonna happen.)

"Come on, nobody's up for a little consensual agony? What's a small spot of torture between friends! Should we draw lots again?"

"Ugh, _shut_ up." He glowers tiredly at the arrancars in attendance at the moment in the gigantic underground field. Not a one of them looks enthused; Menoly cringes. She hasn't gone in a while, has she...

Whatever. Kurosaki ain't gonna be out of school for another three hours, if he believes the clock Kisuke left by the ladder. (Stalking Kurosaki is _almost_ as boring as haunting the training field but he does need to stretch his legs and he's tired of beating on Dordoni.) He stands. 

"Grimmjow! Very good. If the failure point is reiryoku level we will know it straight away!"

He bats half-heartedly at Urahara Waki as he goes to the ladder. "If you wanted a weakling you shoulda asked for one."

He doesn't even try to shoo Di Roy away. By now if the Uraharas wanted any of them dead, they'd be dead -- just gotta off him while he's being experimented on, then seal the training grounds and go shooting up the chaos. But it's protocol, or what-the-fuck ever. Edrad and Nakeem insisted.

Mind, Grimmjow does make even Dordoni take someone with him while it's his turn, and Dordoni used to be an Espada. And Di Roy is weak as hell; Grimmjow ain't too sure what use he'd be...

Protocol. Makes the rabble less panicky. He's too _done_ to fight it.

He jumps for the top of the ladder, pushes the trap open, swears when Waki arrows through the gap between his arm and his head to rejoin her other half.

"You trying to make me fall?"

"Oh, would it bother you _that_ much?" the human Urahara asks innocently, his crow perched on top of his hat. "I thought hollows didn't react to daemon-touching with the same visceral--"

Grimmjow hauls himself out and lets the panel drop back on Di Roy because fuck this. " _Hunger_. Visceral _hunger_ and you fucking know it." Ugh. Never mind. Urahara's impossible to rattle. "Where do you want me."

Without another word, the Uraharas gesture him at a weirdly waxy, featureless corpse on a table in the next room over, Waki fanning out her wing as Kisuke sweeps out his arm.

Fucken' _sigh_. It's gonna be awful. One step closer, though. One day they'll get there.

Or they'll die first. 

Then Grimmjow won't have to get into a sucky-ass torture corpse ever again. 

He hops up onto the edge of the table, stands over the body's hips, giving it one last look. Color, shape -- it doesn't seem any different from the dozen previous ones. Sighing, he turns, sits fast. 

Pain shoots up his spine. He makes himself lie down into it anyway.

One -- lava bubbles up through his hollow hole, filling it with burning. Two; his skin feels too-tight, his innards squeezed like a toothpaste tube that wasn't unscrewed all the way. Three. What's a breath, what's a heartbeat, what's a body. He tries to -- four. He's screaming already. If he gets to ten and it hasn't exploded he can burst out. Fi--

The toothpaste tube unscrews under the pressure and loses half its creamy guts. Half its -- his _self_ , his. Grimmjow screams, can do nothing but scream and try to claw the pain out of his arms, his guts, his throat. It hurts, he's blind with golden pain, deaf and raw. He arches off the table.

Something lands across his chest and slaps his hands off his own skin.

Breath shuddering against its weight, he blinks tears out of his eyes. The ceiling looks weird. His fingertips are red and so are his forearms. His...

Her eyes are still golden. There are still rosettes speckling her eyebrows and forehead with secret black-on-black. She still... 

He opens his mouth to say her name ( _Gri--_ ) and she places a paw as wide as his face on his mouth. 

"Well, that fucking hurt," she says, but her voice is low and quiet and teasing-amused, her mind is grief-relief-I missed you so long, her heart is -- 

_Not my name_.

He knows what she means by that silencing paw. 

Yeah. He ain't Jack either, is he. Wouldn't have been too surprised if she came back as some other beast; Waki-and-Kisuke babbled so fucking much about that possibility. Like... He's not sure. A tiger. A mountain lion. A black _leopard_. A _white_ leopard.

"And you're still as dumb as ever."

Like _fuck_ she would ever allow herself to change like that, he-she-they think. Other arrancar can throw away everything they are and say they're reinventing themselves or whine that they've lived too long with other souls pressing onto theirs or what the fuck ever, but not them. No.

He has a niggling feeling that her spots aren't in the right places. He keeps staring at her face trying to make sure. Trying to...

"They're in the right places for _me_." 

"But--"

"Jack was blond."

"Point."

He falls silent then, just staring up at her; his mind is quiet. He can see flashes of his own face through her eyes, the teal marks under his eyes that damn well weren't there before either. (He's mask-less. How weird. His face looks asymmetrical somehow even though it's the other way around.) 

His belly aches where the gigai is filled with fake flesh, but that's distant, that doesn't matter when the whole length of his body is covered with warmth and fur and muscles. 

Huh.

"I'm naked, aren't I."

He and his daemon stare at each other for another second and start chuckling, and then laughing full out. They laugh and they laugh and she's squashing him flat into the table and he doesn't care. He has his arms around her neck and her raspy hell-tongue stripping layers of skin off his face, grossly damp and. They're laughing.

"Where _were_ you?" he asks, and his voice breaks. 

He knows where she was. With every other soul he's ever devoured, torn loose of Self and wrapped up in a spider's cocoon and siphoned of power. Trapped. Food. Asleep...

... Not asleep. Blank and cut away from everything, no feelings, no changes. Aware but not. 

That kind of sounds like Hell, he thinks. This powerless stasis. 

"I'm always with you," she says into his neck, and starts to purr. "Even when you can't tell, you dumb fucker, where else would I be."

He presses his face against black fur. "I ate you."

"Only because I didn't eat you first. Let's try again."

She actually puts his head inside her maw. Laughing wetly, Grimmjow shoves at her chest and belly with arms and feet. Her fangs dimple his forehead. "Ow, you bitch."

She hops off the table with easy grace and he follows, or tries to; his body is weirdly heavy. He stumbles over the edge, has to catch himself on a knee. "Shit, that actually smarts a bit." 

He flicks at his foream with a nail past the unhealed scratches, standing back up and leaning his weight on her sinuous back. Yeah, he's feeling that.

"You need to tune up your gigai so it can do a passable hierro," he says absently to Waki-and-Kisuke, who are still in the room even though Di Roy and Tessai-and-Hirone are not. They're... Grimmjow has to stretch a little harder than usual to feel them, but they're just on the other side of the wall anyway.

"I think we'll first work on making the separation a little less painful, but sure. By the way, our apologies for the lack of privacy. We needed to be here in case she destabilized and exploded in grisly chunks, or maybe double-hollowified? Hm, that would have been interesting."

Kisuke sounds so breezy and unconcerned as he guides them to stand on a little platform full of measuring instruments and bedecked in screens and warning lights, Grimmjow almost forgets he just cried like a toddler in front of him. His face is still all damp, tears and saliva drying on him; he wipes with his wrist.

Fuck but he did scratch himself good and proper there. Kinda stings. What a weird feeling.

"Clothes?"

"In a minute," Waki says as she turns a knob with her beak. "Even more apologies but see, it turns out even such a silly thing as your proportions being off by even a millimeter would be an indicator of the gigai not adapting to your spiritual body and being likely to go critical."

He and his panther exchange a long, heavy-lidded look; then when Kisuke turns to face them, done typing something out, Grimmjow cups his whole crotch in one hand and lifts it up a bit.

"Yeah," he drawls, "I think my proportions are fine."

Kisuke's lips press together like he's trying not to laugh; he gives Grimmjow's junk a dubious look. Grimmjow and his daemon give matching, synchronized grins, all teeth out. 

"Thank you for your invaluable contribution to science, Jaegerjaquez-san."

"Yeah, I'm a very contributing kind of guy." He can't stop grinning. "Shit, I'd kiss you for that one."

"Pass!" Waki sings out cheerfully. "Very flattered but also very pass. And all our readings look normal so far but let's put tracking collars on the both of you to monitor everything. There might be some fine-tuning."

Tessai is coming back in with an armful of clothes. Grimmjow hops off the platform, goes to him. "I don't suppose _you_ want a kiss," his daemon asks, looking him up and down and then slinking her way to the man's huge tortoise to pretend like she's gonna rub all along her shelled side. Grimmjow can feel every cushioned impact of her paws on the floor, every swing of her weight.

Tessai's moustache quivers in a very entertaining way. Smirking, Grimmjow slings an arm around his neck -- then takes the clothes from him. 

"Kidding. But then again!"

He pulls the underwear up his legs as she winds back around to him and whacks him with her tail, both of them chortling like oil tycoons. 

"I take it you're feeling well," Tessai's Hirone says kind of gently, kind of amused. 

Di Roy moves in the doorway and then stops, hands clenched on both sides of the doorjamb. The way he looks at Grimmjow's daemon is -- raw, full of too many things Grimmjow doesn't want to look at. 

"How _are_ you feeling, emotionally speaking?" Kisuke asks. Grimmjow doesn't look away from Di Roy, who doesn't look away from the panther.

"I'm feeling."

"Hm? -- Ooooh."

"A little more detail?" Hirone presses gently.

Grimmjow shrugs, sticks his hands in jeans pockets. He's still shirtless. His belly is filled in. "Dunno how much is just... Having her back, just _knowing_ that. And how much is..."

They're feeling a little sorry for Di Roy, right now. Grimmjow knows alone he wouldn't have.

"I'm pretty good at feeling pissed usually. Playful, mostly with things I'm killing." He shrugs. "Horny, never."

He turns away from Di Roy to look at them, because he doesn't want to see his face when she turns around and casually-carelessly-deliberately brushes the very end of her tail against the guy's leg.

(Empty, hungry, jealous and torn -- adoring. It gives him a twist of gut-churning embarrassment.)

"Aaah. Emotional landscape more.... Filled in?"

"Let's go with that." He runs his fingers through dense fur. She rubs heavy against his knee, sends him wobbling to the side. He felt the touch against Di Roy like it was his own strands of fur that shifted with the contact. "How long do I get in this one?"

Kisuke's eyes are too knowing, Tessai's mouth too soft. It itches under his skin, wanting to turn away from it, from them seeing through him. She curls up her lip, baring the tip of fangs. Like hell they're doing that.

"Let's go with one hour, for data collection, and then -- yes, Rinker-san, I'll get started on batch production. It should go pretty fast now I've got the formula mostly down, maybe a couple of days. Ah, but please stay upstairs and indoors for now, we don't want your friends getting impatient or the neighbors too curious..."

Waki makes shooing motions with her wings. Grimmjow accepts the two collars Tessai is handing him, clips one to her neck and one to his own, watches hers light up a steady golden in a couple places whose meaning he has no clue about. 

It goes nice with her eyes. He caresses her forehead with a knuckle, because he can.

"Oh -- we forgot to ask. What's your name?" Hirone asks. 

Grimmjow's daemon pauses at the door, turns to look at them, blinking slowly.

Not Margriet, he knows, that's for sure. She's never gonna be Jack's Griet again.

Jack's mother's daemon named her. He wonders for one second if the person she is now would want someone else to name her... Nah. 

Margriet means daisy. The big ones. Leucanthemum... something. He used to know it. He's not sure anymore why. Maybe Jack's mom, but that's an educated guess, not a memory. He doesn't actually care if he never does remember her. She ain't _his_ mom.

It's right, though. The same flower, just colder.

"Leucanthe," she says, all teeth out.

"Doesn't that mean _white_ fl--"

"I don't feel _that_ well-disposed toward you," Grimmjow warns, not very seriously, and flicks his middle finger up in goodbye as he turns to walk out.

His daemon ( _his daemon_ ) walks with him. 

(They obviously have to relearn the best way to pass doors. Side by side is gonna need more calibrations.)

They amble through the house, her flank to his leg. They've never been given liberty to poke around before. He doesn't actually want to pay attention to any of this shit -- the secret rooms and the stocks of strange products and everything. Just to how right it is to walk like this, all fur and heavy muscles and ready teeth. 

Kisuke told them not to get out but the back porch probably doesn't count as out. Or he's ready to argue that it doesn't. It's just a tiny strip of wood overlooking a tinier strip of gravel with some wild grass poking through, and then a cement wall; the back of an apartment building right behind it. No risk of being seen.

The gigai smothers his spiritual pressure enough that there's probably no risk of being felt through the wards either. Anyone looks down from their bathroom window, he and Leucanthe will just look like some guy having a lazy smoke on the porch.

He sits; she sprawls, head heavy on his lap. His throat goes choked up all over again.

"One hour," he says. One hour and he's losing her again.

"I ain't lost, dumbass. Just waiting."

He knows she dreads it like he does; dreads it worse. When he's a hollow Grimmjow's reaction to his soul being amputated of her is... His grief is pretty much mostly stopped at the anger stage. (Maybe some despair thrown in, but well-buried.) He's not sad, he's not listless -- which, good, he doesn't wanna be, but.

There's no tenderness in his missing her either. No nostalgia. Nothing beautiful or soft; just possessive and thwarted. It's so odd. He's still Grimmjow either way, still not Jack, but.

Leucanthe's reaction to losing him is not that nice. Grimmjow gets partial emotional anesthesia; she doesn't have that comfort. She gets everything he's not feeling, only she doesn't know what's happening; she can't do shit with it. Not make him act; not make him reflect. Not make him evolve, like any living thing. He's been the exact same hollow ever since he changed; it's only his brainpower that's gotten any better.

"Iunno." She yawns. "There was this one time you _didn't_ want to fight."

\-- Oh. Kurosaki. He doesn't even know if she means the time he decided he didn't want to approach that fucking black lioness ever again if he didn't have to, or that time she. They. Those _fuckers_.

Leucanthe echoes out that desperate gratefulness, a drowning man catching a rope. Yeah. That one. He didn't even know he felt so -- shit, that's embarrassing. Explains why he went so hard against Ulquiorra, he guesses. He was just -- it made sense at the time, he was so _pissed_. It seemed logical, kind of. He ducks his head, rubs at the back of his head; Leucanthe laughs silently, tongue lolling out.

"See? Baby steps."

"Fuck off. I wanna fight him _now,_ just to shut you up."

"Fight him because he's gonna be fun, you idiot. You were so busy sulking over me you went and deprived yourself of the fight of the century."

"... I forgot how much I hate it when you're right." He shoves at her shoulder. He is not even close to meaning it. "Let me lie to myself even a little bit, cripes."

"Nope. That half-assed shit is not worthy of us."

Sighing, he reclines onto his hands, tilts his head back. The sky's grey with some blue peeking through. It's actually kind of cold, windy, and he's still shirtless. He doesn't quite feel it as he should, buried half into his daemon's sense of her fur-cloaked body, partially shielded from the wind by her bulk.

Still unpleasant, but he doesn't want to go back inside.

"Stop hovering," he tells Di Roy without turning back. 

Di Roy wanders out, sits at the other end of the porch, weirdly shy. He's a mouthy little braggart usually, too arrogant by half for his power level. Grimmjow tilts his head. 

"Hmm?"

"Nothin', boss." A pause. "She's really cool."

Grimmjow cracks a lopsided smirk.

"... I really wanna eat her," Di Roy admits, quieter, muffled into his knees.

Grimmjow shrugs. "Yeah, I bet."

Leucanthe stretches out her legs, toes splayed out, turns her head so that her jaw is digging into Grimmjow's thigh and she can see Di Roy. "What do you think yours will be like?"

"--Oh. Oh, I. Wow, I have no idea?" He brightens up, his fucked-up teeth showing as he starts to smile. "I don't even remember what she was the first time around. Also seriously I don't care. Wow. Can I be next, Boss? Can I -- can I go next."

"If Urahara doesn't need a specific victim for his next attempt, sure. I'll send Edrad up to spot you."

"Oh fuck yes." He wriggles in his seat. Grimmjow rolls his eyes, but kind of semi-fondly.

(Oh. That's what 'fond' feels like in full surround sound. Huh. Weird.)

Di Roy sneaks him a side-look, still grinning like a dunce. "So... Horny, huh?" 

Pff. "I am not fucking you."

"Aw, why not."

"I fuck you, I'm gonna have to fuck Nakeem and Edrad too to keep things fair, and Nakeem won't be into it. Then that bitch Loly will be bitching up a storm about favoritism and then we'll have a revolution to seize the dick of production." He shakes his head. "I'm too hot, Di Roy, it's a curse."

Di Roy stares at him for several stunned seconds, and then bursts into hysterical cackles. Leucanthe rolls onto her back to snicker to herself. Grimmjow grins.

He actually does kind of want to get laid, for once, but not extremely strongly. It's just a generalized awareness that if the right person walks up and asks he may actually shelve his instinctive horror of the helplessness and distraction at crucial moments involved with sex to get himself some serious skin to skin contact. The orgasms, he can give to himself -- and has been -- but the physical contact... He _may_ possibly have missed that. Huh.

"The real reason is he's not into people who can't beat his face in," Leucanthe says silkily, upside-down and smug. Which, true, but fuck her anyway. Grimmjow plants a foot on her shoulder and shoves her straight off the porch. 

She slinks over the edge like there ain't a single bone in her body. He's fine with it until he can't see even the tip of her tail. Then he's leaning over with a pang of anxiety and checking she's still around even though he can feel perfectly well that she's -- _fucking going around from underneath to tackle him from the side_. Bitch. 

Oof. Squashed under a hundred and fifty pounds of jaguar. He really isn't fast in this gigai. Or resilient to flattening. What he is, is tender-amused, and embarrassed-amused, and a hundred nuances of alright with the universe and not angry at all that he has no name for.

It's cool. He's cool. 

He's actually pretty great, he thinks, just before the other half of his soul starts licking his perfect hair into dripping, gluey hell-tangles. After that he's great _and_ murderous, but they're cool with that too.


End file.
